Sky Crew Review: Fly the Delicious Skies

The Good

Unique set-up that ditches the traditional genre layout.

Focus on speed strips out a lot of unnecessary features.

The Bad

Gameplay is lacking in variety.

Upgrades aren't very interesting.

When you think about fine dining and delicious meals, nothing sounds more appealing than a bite of scrumptious airline food. Wait, what? It’s true! At least, for the passengers in Sky Crew it is. This unique time management game turns the genre on its side and has you serving people from your trusty flight attendant cart. The difference is the food is actually good, and giving it to people makes them happy. Novel idea, right?

Sky Crew banks on the familiar set-up of piling a bunch of edible ingredients together and letting you do the heavy lifting. As a flight attendant at 30,000 feet, you’ve got a limited selection of goods you can plate up and pass out. Passengers order a simple dish, you piece it together and hand it to them. Easy. Recipes are usually something simple like putting a slice of pineapple on a plate, pouring cola into a glass, or making an ice cream cone by clicking on a machine. Hey, nobody said being a flight attendant would require lots of technical knowledge. Just roll with it!

You can only serve a small selection of passengers at a time, owing to the limited space on planes. To combat this, Sky Crew divides the screen into slidable sections you can switch between at the click of a button. If a passenger out of your current view needs something, simply tap the red arrow and you’ll zoom ahead. Moving back and forth is a key skill in both the game and being a flight attendant in real life.

The challenge in Sky Crew isn’t so much meeting customer demand, it’s balancing pre-prepared food with current levels of stock. There’s no penalty for throwing away food, and once you make something it doesn’t go bad. This is extraordinarily helpful since you can only hold a few of each ingredient at a time. To refill, step back into the cargo room and click the items you need, then head back out and start serving. Upgrades between levels give you a chance to increase the amount your cart can carry, but making trips to the cargo room will always be a thing.

Sky Crew keeps everything super simple. You don’t have to worry about seating or taking customers’ money, just give them the food they want as fast as you can. You don’t have to do complex recipes or arrange intricate dishes, just drag and drop ingredients and send it on its way. This largely works in the game’s favor, as it allows you to focus on speed rather than accuracy, something too many time management games attempt to juggle but fail. The downside is an unfortunate lack in variety you start to feel after a dozen levels. You’re always performing the same basic motions no matter what flight you’re on or what food you’re serving. Who cares if its grapefruit and kiwi instead of pineapple? Click and drop and get it over with. The upgrades are similarly simplistic and don’t really change what happens in the game. It starts to wear a little thin after a time.

Once you start the Sky Crew clickfest you’ll have a lot of fun. The game aims to fulfill one well-defined aspect of time management entertainment, speed, and it does so with great success. This unfortunately comes at the cost of variety. Developer Rin Games did a fantastic job keeping things balanced, however, making Sky Crew a unique and worthy entry in the time management genre.